Tundra

That’s how the story started out. While I held a book in my hands, the man and man-like creature who would become characters in a tale that involved me were driving and drowning, daring and dying respectively. Eiron lunged towards an uncertain future, while Aais’ future seemed altogether too certain.

Meanwhile, alone in the library tower, I had worked so long that I had forgotten the joys of the very thing I clasped in my hands– other people’s words. When I had time for words, always by dying light, it was only my own I read and reread by glow of guttering candles whose faltering flames licked the faded tapestries on otherwise bare, stone walls. Yet, for all my labours, my efforts bore only shrivelled fruit. I had still not discovered the seed of my masterpiece, the text that would best display all my knowledge of spells and lore and my story-telling ability, and transform me from an Adept to a Master of Runes.

Thus, I had decided to travel, to do some field work, if you will. Robed in academic black, I strode out of my stone walls to join the quiet, folded night and the mammoth riders who could take me closer to the forest that was the druids’ rumoured home. A thin, horned moon was in the midnight sky, and the distant glaciers were lit by banners of blue aurora lights. Great, shaggy mammoth caravans plodded across the tundra, that the makktaku called ghasha –the shared mother of all our fates– in slow time with the turning universe. The clouds were gathering, and so was I; gathering material for the book I was still intent on writing.

The caravan was a curious concoction of nature and mankind. Each of the swaying huts on the backs of the staggering beasts was made from leather stretched over tusks. Out on the tundra, as I had quickly learned, nothing was wasted. As haunches rolled, huts rocked, but everything was rhythmic, planned, safe. The mammoth riders themselves had a lot in common with their steeds, being equally robust and woolly. Instead of swords drawn in glittering arcs, such as I had seen at home in Tyrian City, or spears sharp and thick enough to impale giant squids, such as the Seafarers used, they relied on clubs and projectiles that were actual bones– femurs and even fragments of skulls. These weapons were sufficiently dense to pose a danger to members of other, roaming tribes, as well as to the smaller mammals on the tundra, which the mammoth riders readily hunted. In a wasteland, there was little nourishment to be had from mosses, grasses and lichens.

I clambered less than ably into the cockpit of one of the rocking caravans atop a grizzled beast near the head of the pack. This was a great honour, and one that I could not explain, given my position as an outsider. It did not seem like the tundra to foster such trust. Yet, there was something friendly about the mammoth riders who called themselves makktaku. They were not a graceful race, but everything they did was skilled and showed ability. They were broad-chested, fearless and proud. It took strength, I eventually realised, to have so little to fear from the tundra that you could enable a complete stranger to ride at the front of your procession. Perhaps this was also a convenient place to keep an eye on me.

I had one cabin mate, an ancient shaman with a protruding forehead and a headdress made from slivers of bone caught up in leather straps like flies in a web. The skin at his cheeks was wrinkled and sagged like elephant hide, and his eyes had the same intense, grey stare that everyone out here seemed to have. His cold heart called for the glaciers that jutted hundreds of feet above the howling grasslands. It was not a callous call, although it might have been mistaken as such by a Blackmouth mage. I could tell, the lines around his eyes still smiled a smile of subtle wisdom. I had been placed with him because we were both wise men together, but I was startled to see the way in which he was a normal part of the tapestry of mammoth rider life. Sorcerers were not nearly so highly regarded in my own culture.

‘You’re from the Tower,’ he told me, in his own tongue, in which I was less than adept. I nodded in reply. He was not afraid to ask the begged question. Tundra men of all races did not shy away from what needed to be done. ‘Why are you here?’

‘I want to see the forest,’ I replied. ‘My kind have no means of travelling there without magic, and I could not commission a beast master or an air caster for the occasion.’ Underneath the woven spinifex mat on which we both sat, cross-legged, I felt every step of the slow, cosmic march of the mammoth we rode. Then, the shaman did something unexpected. The smile in his lines sparkled in his ice-hard irises, and the lines became like fissures in a cracking egg.

‘Beast masters!’ he exploded, fully fledged laughter rumbling in peals out of his thick lips. ‘You have no such thing, frail man. Beasts would crush you.’

Indeed, I was painfully aware of my leaner, lankier physique. I was liable to be blown away by tundra winds, and I was sure that I would find no protection in my bones from blows inflicted playfully by handled mammoths. Even my forehead, which did not jut, would be insufficient to protect my mind. I was not bred in this hostile land. I was therefore not truly part of it.

‘No matter,’ I said, dismissing my inadequacy. ‘I have come to find druids.’

But the mammoth man was not paying attention to me anymore. Another procession had joined that of the mammoths. Shuffling rather than plodding alongside us, but matching our pace nonetheless, were more hominid giants, only they could not have been related to people. Their feet were as tree trunks, and their upper limbs as hanging branches, complete with claws as long as harvest scythes. Each mass was purplish and lumpy, barely recognisable as having two arms, two legs and a compressed head.

‘What are those?’ I asked, but I was to receive no answer that day.

The shaman only shook his head.